I never said the neutrinos would interact with magnetic lines...
Ummm, yes you did and I quote:
Since the electrons that make aurora bounce or reflect (particle or wave, you choose) as they ride down Earth's magnetic lines and go back up, perhaps the high energy neutrinos also bounce from a direct hit or "reflect" under the right conditions.
You give the example of electrons reflecting and riding on field lines and then ask if neutrinos can do the same thing under the right circumstances. Hence you asked if neutrinos can also reflect along magnetic field lines. You cannot ride along the field lines without an EM interaction to tie you too them. You might not have intended to ask that but that is, indeed, exactly what you asked. Do try to keep up with the basics of the English, or indeed any other, language where sentences are related to each other.
However, the alternative explanation you are saying that you meant to ask is even more bizarre. You now seem to want to know if neutrinos can just reflect without any interaction with a field in which case the answer is very obviously no because of an extremely fundamental law: conservation of momentum.
But photons fall in gravitational fields, so has the question been answered?
Well yes it has if you believe in general relativity where the gravitational field couples to what we call the 4-momentum of a particle (essentially a 4D vector combining energy and "ordinary" momentum). GR requires that gravitational fields will be attractive to all particles. However, while extremely fundamental, nobody has ever tested this with antimatter. So while everyone is expecting the answer to be that antimatter falls it is nevertheless worth checking because checking the predictions of our theories under new and different circumstances is how we find out if our theories are wrong.
Well for a start the options are going to be limited and, had they done that with the boat I doubt "Boaty-McBoatface" would have been an option. However, an even better option would be to film all the optional endings and then let each viewer choose how they want it to end. Sort of like the Butterfly Effect did where there were four endings: happy, sad, unclear and the director's.
How about those who just believe that discrimination based on gender, age, religion or race is just wrong? Yes, such discrimination still goes on society but you are not going to get rid of it by legally requiring such discrimination in the same way that you cannot get rid of corruption by bribing politicians to take action against it.
For that purpose, it's worthwhile for healthy adults (like doctors) who are likely to come into contact with the elderly, immunosuppressed patients, etc.
Yet the evidence shows that, unless they are forced to, about half of medical professionals will not get the flu shot and the main reason suggested by this study is that they remain unconvinced by the effectiveness of the vaccine. I'm not aware of any other common vaccines have this sort of credibility problem amongst health professionals so, if flu vaccines really are effective why is there such a problem convincing those who know the most about medicine of this?
Can you explain us how do you create antimatter in this universe?
Smash things together with enough energy or, even simpler, find any nucleus which undergoes beta decay. The most common form of beta decay produces an electron and antineutrino (which is antimatter eventhough it will hardly ever interact) but there is also beta+ decay where a positron (antielectron) and neutrino are emitted.
The latter type is used by medical physicists in positron emission tomography. This can detect tumors too small to be seen any other way by using the two photons produced by the positron annihilating with an electron in your body to reconstruct where the molecules containing the decaying nucleus was in your body. It can also be used to study how drugs are absorbed.
Couldn't this be a case of a butterfly flapped its wings...
Short answer: no, assuming you mean some random fluctuation in the early Universe. For the excess of matter over anti-matter in the early universe to be due to such a random fluctuation, there would have to be some process that allows more matter than anti-matter to be created and we have not seen anything that does this yet.
However, we have seen a bias between matter and antimatter in decays of certain types of particles made of quarks and anti-quarks bound together. While this is not enough to create more matter than anti-matter if the same effect exists in the oscillations of neutrinos then there may just be enough to explain the excess of matter over antimatter. However, this would still not be a random fluctuation but rather that the universe has an inbuilt bias in the laws of physics which favours matter over antimatter.
As an interesting aside this difference, called CP violation, is also the only physics we know of that requires three generations of quarks and leptons to exist. If there were only two generations we could not have a difference at least via this mechanism.
Anti-neutrons are definitely different from neutrons. Neutrons are made up of 3 quarks, two down and one up whereas anti-neutrons are made of three anti-quarks, two anti-down and one anti-up.
This is because neutrons are made of fermions which have different particle and antiparticle states. Only bosons, like the photon, have the same particle and antiparticle states.
I was implying that the electroweak force may have a similar mechanism to the electromagnetic force, not that neutrinos would interact electromagnetically.
What you asked was whether neutrinos would ever bounce up and down the field lines like electrons. This requires an EM interaction since the field lines you talk about are from a magnetic field. This is not an interaction between matter and neutrinos which can proceed by any type of interaction that both atoms and neutrinos feel but an interaction between a particle and a field where the interaction type has to be the one producing the field.
Hence as I said, it is not possible for neutrinos to bounce up and down the lines of the Earth's magnetic field: they do not have any direct interaction with the field and at any energy where an indirect (second order) interaction might be even vaguely likely (it would be even weaker than a normal weak interaction!) the energy of the neutrino would be so high that the amount of deflection would be tiny due to the weakness of the field and certainly no where near enough to reflect it.
Stop lying when lives are at stake. Medical professionals in the US are required to get the flu shots. It's not true only a small amount of them get it - 100% gets it
Sorry, but I'm not the one spreading lies. The vaccination rate among medical professionals in the US is high but well short of 100% according to this article. Furthermore when not mandated the article states that the rate drops to 45%.
In Canada it seems the rates have increased somewhat in recent years but still around half do not get vaccinated as this, very pro-flu vaccine article states. In BC making it mandatory has increased rates of vaccination to 80% but that's avoiding the point.
If the only way you can get medical professionals to have flu vaccinations is to force them to it raises very serious questions about how medically valuable this vaccination is. Trying to cast doctors as uncaring, as the Alberta article does, has not been my experience, Generally, they seem to just disagree that the shots are worth it due to the rapid-evolving, unpredictable nature of the virus. The recommendation I have always received is that when you get elderly it is worth it but for a normal, healthy adult the benefit is minimal.
No, for two reasons. First the electrons trapped by the Earth's magnetic field have an electric charge so they interact with EM fields. Neutrinos have no charge and hence are completely oblivious to any EM field. Secondly, though, the energy of neutrino they detected, 0.6EeV is ~100,000 times higher in energy than a proton in the LHC. At these energies even if we had an electron the Earth's magnetic field would be far, far too weak to reflect it.
Isn't it weird if this only happens in Antarctica?
No, that is just the Streetlight effect. The ice in Antarctica makes an ideal medium for detecting these particles so it is not surprising that we see them there.
I have read many times that the flu shots will result in reduced symptoms
Provided that they have guessed the right strain of the virus for that year and that it does not mutate too much. However, the clearest evidence I have seen against the flu vaccine is that, at least where I live, only a small minority of medical professionals get it themselves.
Any vaccine which you cannot convince a majority of highly-trained, medical professionals to take clearly has somewhat dubious benefits. The health authority has realised this optics problem and has talked about making the flu vaccine mandatory but if the only way you can get doctors to have the flu vaccine themselves is to threaten them with being fired then you clearly lack a compelling medical argument for the vaccine.
Actually, you might be a lot closer than you thought to a possible explanation (not the alien bit but the mutation), assuming these observations are confirmed. We already now that neutrinos oscillate between different flavours as they travel - or as you put it "mutate". However, all the known flavours interact via the weak force which, at these insanely high energies, is no longer very weak at all.
One way around having all the high energy neutrinos interacting with the Earth is something called a sterile neutrino. This is a hypothetical new "flavour" of neutrino which does not interact at all. Some experiments have claimed to observe evidence for them but I think it is fair to say that many of us particle physicists remain rather unconvinced by the data so far.
However, if these sterile neutrinos do exist then they may allow neutrinos to survive passage through the Earth even at realy high energies. Essentialy a high energy neutrino "mutates" into a sterile neutrino, flies through the Earth and then mutates back into a known-flavour of neutrino, interacts in the ice and is picked up by ANITA.
There are a lot of ifs involved at this stage. The first thing is that we need to confirm (or not) ANITA's observation and interestingly (at least for those of us who work on it!) the IceCube experiment is probably in one of the best positions to do this. If confirmed then things will get a lot more interesting but while you are waiting for that expect lots of crazy ideas (like yours but with equations) from theorists trying to explain it!
Neutrinos are leptons (like the electron) but have no charge. This means that they cannot interact via the electromagnetic force like every other matter-like particle (fermion). Instead, they can only interact via the weak interaction.
We have known for several decades that the electromagnetic and weak interactions are really two aspects of the same electroweak force. What makes the weak force different from the electromagnetic force is that the carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons, have large masses ~90 times that of a proton whereas the electromagnetic force is transmitted by massles photons.
At low energies when particles collide there is not enough energy to create "real" (on-shell) W and Z bosons and so it is extremely rare that particles will interact via the weak force at low energy. So, if this is the ONLY way you have to interact you basically hardly every interact at all. This is what happens for low energy neutrinos.
However, at _really_ high energy - about 10,000 times or more the energy of a proton in the Large Hadron Collider - collisions of neutrinos with matter have enough energy to create real W and Z bosons. When this happens the chance of a weak interaction starts to become similar to that of an electromagnetic interaction and neutrinos can no longer pass through the Earth.
As is your prerogative. However, as I said, your approach is good for schools but is a poor choice at University where we are teaching very close to the limits of human knowledge.
I like that one, but you could still get some odd edge case where a recent impact splashes life-bearing rocks to the Moon or Mars.
Actually, that is what I really did not understand about the lengthy definition. If such an impact happened "recently" then it has almost certainly happened before and probably lots of times. If so then you really have no idea where life originated and so the only definition that makes any sense is based on planet of residency because that's all you can determine.
This is how science should work... a successful test, some major carnage to show how cool your work is, and major bragging rights for how much of a "boom" you made.
Not really. It's fine when you are doing what these guys are doing but, as a particle physicist who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, the "major carnage" crazy people worried about us causing was end-of-the-world carnage. While it is true that we would have had amazing bragging rights for creating the biggest bang in the now much sorter history of humanity, speaking personally, that's the sort of bragging we can quite literally all live without.
Of course, the reason the LHC was safe actually relied on observation more than calculation. Cosmic rays striking the Earth can create collisions with energies well above what the LHC and yet despite their best efforts over the past 4.5 billion years the planet is still here.
It was controllable in that they can adjust the strength of the field. It was accidental in that their estimate of the field strength was very low and they did not design the apparatus to contain the effects of such a strong field. Now that they have a calibration point they can improve the containment to cope with the larger than expected field and can adjust the field itself by changing how much energy they dump into the coil to get the field desired.
But do you believe that women really do have an innate advantage in non-STEM subjects?
I honestly have no real idea. However, the data in the study suggest that this is might be the case because they found the largest gender gaps in non-STEM fields such as English where girls scored an average grade of 7.8% above boys. I suppose that an alternative explanation might be discrimination against men in non-STEM fields but this seems rather unlikely. So, assuming the data give an accurate representation of what is happening the most plausible explanation in my view is that women do have an advantage in these fields either through innate ability or more interest and motivation compared to men.
That is EXACTLY what the study says. To quote: "The biggest gender gaps were in non-STEM subjects such as English, where girls earned 7.8% higher average grades and 13.8% less variable grades than boys.".
Boys and girls have both the same abilities. However, boys tend to be more inclined to pursue studies in science.
...or less inclined to follow arts-based courses. This study also shows that girls are better than boys at non-STEM courses by a far more significant margin than the reversed difference in STEM courses at school. So perhaps the deficit in STEM degrees is because more women choose non-STEM degrees where they do have an ability advantage, on average, over men?
There is a similar story about the cosmologist Werner Israel who appeared on a television show. Unfortunately, the interviewer had prepared lots of questions about lipstick, eyeshadow etc. because she thought he was an expert in cosmetology.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said the neutrinos would interact with magnetic lines...
Ummm, yes you did and I quote:
Since the electrons that make aurora bounce or reflect (particle or wave, you choose) as they ride down Earth's magnetic lines and go back up, perhaps the high energy neutrinos also bounce from a direct hit or "reflect" under the right conditions.
You give the example of electrons reflecting and riding on field lines and then ask if neutrinos can do the same thing under the right circumstances. Hence you asked if neutrinos can also reflect along magnetic field lines. You cannot ride along the field lines without an EM interaction to tie you too them. You might not have intended to ask that but that is, indeed, exactly what you asked. Do try to keep up with the basics of the English, or indeed any other, language where sentences are related to each other.
However, the alternative explanation you are saying that you meant to ask is even more bizarre. You now seem to want to know if neutrinos can just reflect without any interaction with a field in which case the answer is very obviously no because of an extremely fundamental law: conservation of momentum.
But photons fall in gravitational fields, so has the question been answered?
Well yes it has if you believe in general relativity where the gravitational field couples to what we call the 4-momentum of a particle (essentially a 4D vector combining energy and "ordinary" momentum). GR requires that gravitational fields will be attractive to all particles. However, while extremely fundamental, nobody has ever tested this with antimatter. So while everyone is expecting the answer to be that antimatter falls it is nevertheless worth checking because checking the predictions of our theories under new and different circumstances is how we find out if our theories are wrong.
Well for a start the options are going to be limited and, had they done that with the boat I doubt "Boaty-McBoatface" would have been an option. However, an even better option would be to film all the optional endings and then let each viewer choose how they want it to end. Sort of like the Butterfly Effect did where there were four endings: happy, sad, unclear and the director's.
How about those who just believe that discrimination based on gender, age, religion or race is just wrong? Yes, such discrimination still goes on society but you are not going to get rid of it by legally requiring such discrimination in the same way that you cannot get rid of corruption by bribing politicians to take action against it.
For that purpose, it's worthwhile for healthy adults (like doctors) who are likely to come into contact with the elderly, immunosuppressed patients, etc.
Yet the evidence shows that, unless they are forced to, about half of medical professionals will not get the flu shot and the main reason suggested by this study is that they remain unconvinced by the effectiveness of the vaccine. I'm not aware of any other common vaccines have this sort of credibility problem amongst health professionals so, if flu vaccines really are effective why is there such a problem convincing those who know the most about medicine of this?
Can you explain us how do you create antimatter in this universe?
Smash things together with enough energy or, even simpler, find any nucleus which undergoes beta decay. The most common form of beta decay produces an electron and antineutrino (which is antimatter eventhough it will hardly ever interact) but there is also beta+ decay where a positron (antielectron) and neutrino are emitted.
The latter type is used by medical physicists in positron emission tomography. This can detect tumors too small to be seen any other way by using the two photons produced by the positron annihilating with an electron in your body to reconstruct where the molecules containing the decaying nucleus was in your body. It can also be used to study how drugs are absorbed.
Couldn't this be a case of a butterfly flapped its wings...
Short answer: no, assuming you mean some random fluctuation in the early Universe. For the excess of matter over anti-matter in the early universe to be due to such a random fluctuation, there would have to be some process that allows more matter than anti-matter to be created and we have not seen anything that does this yet.
However, we have seen a bias between matter and antimatter in decays of certain types of particles made of quarks and anti-quarks bound together. While this is not enough to create more matter than anti-matter if the same effect exists in the oscillations of neutrinos then there may just be enough to explain the excess of matter over antimatter. However, this would still not be a random fluctuation but rather that the universe has an inbuilt bias in the laws of physics which favours matter over antimatter.
As an interesting aside this difference, called CP violation, is also the only physics we know of that requires three generations of quarks and leptons to exist. If there were only two generations we could not have a difference at least via this mechanism.
Anti-neutrons are definitely different from neutrons. Neutrons are made up of 3 quarks, two down and one up whereas anti-neutrons are made of three anti-quarks, two anti-down and one anti-up.
This is because neutrons are made of fermions which have different particle and antiparticle states. Only bosons, like the photon, have the same particle and antiparticle states.
I was implying that the electroweak force may have a similar mechanism to the electromagnetic force, not that neutrinos would interact electromagnetically.
What you asked was whether neutrinos would ever bounce up and down the field lines like electrons. This requires an EM interaction since the field lines you talk about are from a magnetic field. This is not an interaction between matter and neutrinos which can proceed by any type of interaction that both atoms and neutrinos feel but an interaction between a particle and a field where the interaction type has to be the one producing the field.
Hence as I said, it is not possible for neutrinos to bounce up and down the lines of the Earth's magnetic field: they do not have any direct interaction with the field and at any energy where an indirect (second order) interaction might be even vaguely likely (it would be even weaker than a normal weak interaction!) the energy of the neutrino would be so high that the amount of deflection would be tiny due to the weakness of the field and certainly no where near enough to reflect it.
Stop lying when lives are at stake. Medical professionals in the US are required to get the flu shots. It's not true only a small amount of them get it - 100% gets it
Sorry, but I'm not the one spreading lies. The vaccination rate among medical professionals in the US is high but well short of 100% according to this article. Furthermore when not mandated the article states that the rate drops to 45%.
In Canada it seems the rates have increased somewhat in recent years but still around half do not get vaccinated as this, very pro-flu vaccine article states. In BC making it mandatory has increased rates of vaccination to 80% but that's avoiding the point.
If the only way you can get medical professionals to have flu vaccinations is to force them to it raises very serious questions about how medically valuable this vaccination is. Trying to cast doctors as uncaring, as the Alberta article does, has not been my experience, Generally, they seem to just disagree that the shots are worth it due to the rapid-evolving, unpredictable nature of the virus. The recommendation I have always received is that when you get elderly it is worth it but for a normal, healthy adult the benefit is minimal.
How do you know that this wasn't the 25% test?
No, for two reasons. First the electrons trapped by the Earth's magnetic field have an electric charge so they interact with EM fields. Neutrinos have no charge and hence are completely oblivious to any EM field. Secondly, though, the energy of neutrino they detected, 0.6EeV is ~100,000 times higher in energy than a proton in the LHC. At these energies even if we had an electron the Earth's magnetic field would be far, far too weak to reflect it.
Isn't it weird if this only happens in Antarctica?
No, that is just the Streetlight effect. The ice in Antarctica makes an ideal medium for detecting these particles so it is not surprising that we see them there.
I have read many times that the flu shots will result in reduced symptoms
Provided that they have guessed the right strain of the virus for that year and that it does not mutate too much. However, the clearest evidence I have seen against the flu vaccine is that, at least where I live, only a small minority of medical professionals get it themselves.
Any vaccine which you cannot convince a majority of highly-trained, medical professionals to take clearly has somewhat dubious benefits. The health authority has realised this optics problem and has talked about making the flu vaccine mandatory but if the only way you can get doctors to have the flu vaccine themselves is to threaten them with being fired then you clearly lack a compelling medical argument for the vaccine.
Actually, you might be a lot closer than you thought to a possible explanation (not the alien bit but the mutation), assuming these observations are confirmed. We already now that neutrinos oscillate between different flavours as they travel - or as you put it "mutate". However, all the known flavours interact via the weak force which, at these insanely high energies, is no longer very weak at all.
One way around having all the high energy neutrinos interacting with the Earth is something called a sterile neutrino. This is a hypothetical new "flavour" of neutrino which does not interact at all. Some experiments have claimed to observe evidence for them but I think it is fair to say that many of us particle physicists remain rather unconvinced by the data so far.
However, if these sterile neutrinos do exist then they may allow neutrinos to survive passage through the Earth even at realy high energies. Essentialy a high energy neutrino "mutates" into a sterile neutrino, flies through the Earth and then mutates back into a known-flavour of neutrino, interacts in the ice and is picked up by ANITA.
There are a lot of ifs involved at this stage. The first thing is that we need to confirm (or not) ANITA's observation and interestingly (at least for those of us who work on it!) the IceCube experiment is probably in one of the best positions to do this. If confirmed then things will get a lot more interesting but while you are waiting for that expect lots of crazy ideas (like yours but with equations) from theorists trying to explain it!
Neutrinos are leptons (like the electron) but have no charge. This means that they cannot interact via the electromagnetic force like every other matter-like particle (fermion). Instead, they can only interact via the weak interaction.
We have known for several decades that the electromagnetic and weak interactions are really two aspects of the same electroweak force. What makes the weak force different from the electromagnetic force is that the carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons, have large masses ~90 times that of a proton whereas the electromagnetic force is transmitted by massles photons.
At low energies when particles collide there is not enough energy to create "real" (on-shell) W and Z bosons and so it is extremely rare that particles will interact via the weak force at low energy. So, if this is the ONLY way you have to interact you basically hardly every interact at all. This is what happens for low energy neutrinos.
However, at _really_ high energy - about 10,000 times or more the energy of a proton in the Large Hadron Collider - collisions of neutrinos with matter have enough energy to create real W and Z bosons. When this happens the chance of a weak interaction starts to become similar to that of an electromagnetic interaction and neutrinos can no longer pass through the Earth.
As is your prerogative. However, as I said, your approach is good for schools but is a poor choice at University where we are teaching very close to the limits of human knowledge.
I like that one, but you could still get some odd edge case where a recent impact splashes life-bearing rocks to the Moon or Mars.
Actually, that is what I really did not understand about the lengthy definition. If such an impact happened "recently" then it has almost certainly happened before and probably lots of times. If so then you really have no idea where life originated and so the only definition that makes any sense is based on planet of residency because that's all you can determine.
This is how science should work ... a successful test, some major carnage to show how cool your work is, and major bragging rights for how much of a "boom" you made.
Not really. It's fine when you are doing what these guys are doing but, as a particle physicist who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, the "major carnage" crazy people worried about us causing was end-of-the-world carnage. While it is true that we would have had amazing bragging rights for creating the biggest bang in the now much sorter history of humanity, speaking personally, that's the sort of bragging we can quite literally all live without.
Of course, the reason the LHC was safe actually relied on observation more than calculation. Cosmic rays striking the Earth can create collisions with energies well above what the LHC and yet despite their best efforts over the past 4.5 billion years the planet is still here.
Was it accidental or controllable?
It was controllable in that they can adjust the strength of the field. It was accidental in that their estimate of the field strength was very low and they did not design the apparatus to contain the effects of such a strong field. Now that they have a calibration point they can improve the containment to cope with the larger than expected field and can adjust the field itself by changing how much energy they dump into the coil to get the field desired.
But do you believe that women really do have an innate advantage in non-STEM subjects?
I honestly have no real idea. However, the data in the study suggest that this is might be the case because they found the largest gender gaps in non-STEM fields such as English where girls scored an average grade of 7.8% above boys. I suppose that an alternative explanation might be discrimination against men in non-STEM fields but this seems rather unlikely. So, assuming the data give an accurate representation of what is happening the most plausible explanation in my view is that women do have an advantage in these fields either through innate ability or more interest and motivation compared to men.
That's not really what the study says.
That is EXACTLY what the study says. To quote: "The biggest gender gaps were in non-STEM subjects such as English, where girls earned 7.8% higher average grades and 13.8% less variable grades than boys.".
Boys and girls have both the same abilities. However, boys tend to be more inclined to pursue studies in science.
Life on a planet other than Earth which did not get there as a result of human activity.
There is a similar story about the cosmologist Werner Israel who appeared on a television show. Unfortunately, the interviewer had prepared lots of questions about lipstick, eyeshadow etc. because she thought he was an expert in cosmetology.